Saturday, October 29, 2011

Amazon Cloud Computing

Dr. Werner Vogels is credited with bringing Cloud Computing to Amazon.  In a recent conference, he explains why Amazon is in the Cloud business.

Dr. Vogel says that Amazon is a tech company doing retail not a retail company dabbling in technology as most would believe. 

He refers to the working environment at Amazon to be in "two pizza teams".  I loved the phrase!  A team consists of only as many people as it would take to share 2 pizzas, in other words, teams of 8-10.  Members of this team see projects through start to finish, "you build it, you run it". 

Cloud Services came about as a result of  customers and developers and businesses wanting the following:

1. Design for flexibility
Engineers can use whatever platform they want
Many platforms available

2. Design for On - Demand markets
Capacity needed more for Christmas time sales, etc.

3.  Design for Automation - developers can design automation of any service

4.  Be elastic - creating programs and services to deal with seasonal peaks and still be able to go back to original design when necessary

5.  Design for Failure

6.  Design for utility pricing - know that a customer can walk away anytime so businesses can be competitive.

7.  Break transparency - if you are an end user of webmail, you don't care where the servers are but if you are a developer you will care so Amazon must break transparency.

8.  Decompose in its simplest form - infinitely scalable relational database.

9.  Design with security fence.

10. Don’t do it alone - invited 3rd parties to sell their own products and services.  Let other sites drive sales to amazon and give them a cut.

11. Focus on what does not change - innovation can also be knowing what things should not change.  Having easily readable catalogs, offer low pricing, offer on time delivery, etc.  I thought this point was excellent.  People always seem to focus on what to change and not look at what they shouldn't change.

12.  Let your customers benefit - Amazon has lowered their prices 14 times (Aws services). 

13.  Continuously Innovate - Amazon has done a brilliant job in creating new products and services for their customers and tweaking established products based on customer demands.

To hear Dr. Vogels full presentations, visit http://passionmeetsmomentum.com/#amazon-and-the-lean-cloud

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